RN who claims the state threatens to revoke his license if he keeps tweeting that Covid-19 vaccines can kill you sues to make the state leave him alone

A Methuen nurse active in spreading stories via social media that Covid-19 vaccines cause hearts, kidneys and eyes to fail, fertility to collapse and cancers to start is suing the state Board of Registration in Nursing and its chairwoman over what he says is a threat to revoke his license if he doesn't knock it off.

In his suit, filed today in Suffolk Superior Court, James Cintolo says his posts on Twitter and Substack are just asking questions, that raising questions and being skeptical is part of the long history of medical advances and that, in legal terms, it's his right under the First Amendment and the equivalent section of the Massachusetts constitution to raise questions about corrupt government officials and vaccine companies he claims were producing Covid-19 vaccines even before the virus was announced.

Along with his suit, Cintolo filed a request for a temporary restraining order to bar the board from investigating him or revoking his license while his suit is pending. His complaint says he was forced to stop posting on social media on Feb. 8 because of the threat to revoke his license.

Cintolo, who graduated Laboure College in 2019, alleges that board Chairwoman Margaret Cooke is using "threats, intimidation, or coercion" to try to shut him up, based on a single complaint from an anonymous Internet troll. In the request for a temporary restraining order, his lawyer writes:

The power that this Defendant wields by virtue of her office makes her conduct particularly alarming and should rightfully cause the nurses of the Commonwealth to fear arbitrary sanction if they do not restrain the public expression of their opinions to hose views which could be considered safe or mainstream. Permitting individuals holding offices responsible for oversight and employment of a profession to interfere with the exercise of constitutional rights or members of that profession would obliterate any free discourse by dissenting or minority viewpoints and should therefore spur immediate, unequivocal condemnation and injunction by this Court, lest professionals next be cast out because of closely held beliefs on divisive issues such as abortion, religion, or political affiliation.

In fact, the board is not the only one raising questions about Cintolo's posts. He has his own page on Snopes, related to one particular tweet in which he blamed a woman's kidney failure, heart problem and leg amputations on the vaccine, which she denied and said she had been born with a heart condition. He also got her name wrong.

Reuters reported that a claim he posted that Pfizer had produced 100,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccine in 2019, before most people knew about the virus was wrong; that the number came from a discussion in which a company official was comparing the total - and low - number of vaccine doses of all types the company had produced in 2019 with the need to produce billions of doses of Covid-19 vaccine just one year later.

Complaint (939k PDF).
Request for temporary restraining order (2M PDF).